Top 10 Worst Video Game Launches

BioWare's February 2019 looter-shooter launched with a broken loot system, loading screens between loading screens, and PS4 crashes that bricked consoles—issues that, per user polls, occurred 60% more frequently than Fallout 76's most common bugs at launch. EA officially killed the promised Anthem 2.0 overhaul in February 2021, leaving a development budget over $100 million wasted.

Blizzard's June 2022 mobile entry was technically functional but morally bankrupt. Analysis revealed it could cost over $100,000 to fully gear a character, a 50% higher ceiling than the average mobile pay-to-win game, earning it the lowest Metacritic user score of 0.2 and bans in Belgium and the Netherlands.

Maxis' March 2013 reboot required an always-online connection for a single-player game, and the servers immediately collapsed under demand—a problem that outperforms #9 on this list for day-one failures. Cities were limited to plots that were 80% smaller than those in SimCity 4, and the traffic AI was fundamentally broken.

DICE's November 2021 launch stripped out staple features like a server browser, voice chat, and a traditional scoreboard. The 128-player matches ran terribly, specialists replaced classes, and the game lost 90% of its Steam players within a month—a faster decline than the average triple-A title sees in six months.

343 Industries' November 2014 compilation promised seamless matchmaking across four Halo games, but it was slower to fix than Halo: The Master Chief Collection's own later updates. Instead, multiplayer was essentially nonfunctional for months, with players waiting upwards of 30 minutes to find broken matches—a wait time 10 times longer than the industry standard for online shooters.

2K's October 2019 wrestling game launched with character models that looked like melting wax figures, gameplay glitches that sent wrestlers flying into the stratosphere, and a bug that crashed the game every time the real-world date hit January 1, 2020.

The resulting game was so incomprehensible and unsellable that millions of cartridges were buried in a New Mexico landfill, symbolizing the 1983 video game crash. Its 3.5 million unsold units, buried 30 feet deep, exceeded the total production run of many contemporary hits like Pac-Man.